VISUALIZATION, ETC.

VIS 2013: Hello there

Good morning from Atlanta! This week holds the largest academic
visualization conference of the year, with about 1,000 people all
interested in understanding and creating meaningful and beautiful
visual depictions of data. What’s not to like? Although the conference
proper only starts tomorrow, there are interesting satellite events
today. The two big associated symposia are
BioVis and
LDAV.

BioVis

BioVis is arguably the hottest
area in visualization these days. The combination of world-changing
impact, legendarily messy data problems (and, let’s face it,
better-than-average funding prospects) makes bioinformatics
irresistible. Which is alright with me, because the
following papers look great:

Yes, I have a soft spot in my heart for high-dimensional data
analysis.

LDAV

On the LDAV side, I’m sad to have missed Dr. Guy Lebanon’s keynote
yesterday. Lebanon has long been involved in bridging the
visualization, data mining and machine learning worlds, which is also a favorite
topic of mine. I’m happy to see his work featured in a keynote (does
anyone have a link to his talk or slides?).

A Provably-Robust Sampling Method for Generating Colormaps of Large
Data. David Thompson, C. Seshadhri, Ali Pinar, Janine
Bennett. (preprint? PDF It’s the only link I found).
Data-driven colormap design is, when you think about it, a
straightforward idea, but one appears to have received essentially no
attention until the last couple of years.

Less After the Fact: Investigative Visual Analysis of Events from
Streaming Twitter. Thomas Kraft, Xiaoyu Wang, Jeffery Delawder, Wenwen
Dou, Li Yu, William
Ribarsky. (PDF)
I’m curious about this because of the relationship with our
nanocubes paper, and about how to scale
an interactive tool into querying hundreds of millions of datapoints
at acceptable rates.